Abstract
ABSTRACT This study addresses the urgent need to develop pedagogies that enhance language and literacy learning and identity affirmation (and resistance) opportunities for youth from refugee backgrounds. In Canadian high schools, this population of students enter school with varying levels of literacy in their first language(s), as well as potentially difficult experiences due to their forced migration. For many, language-content learning may become a formidable challenge, negatively impacting identities. A growing corpus of case studies is beginning to show how pedagogies that draw on youth’s everyday meaning making and their intersectional identities can effectively engage refugee-background learners in academic learning. In this qualitative case study involving nine refugee-background youth in an English language learning classroom in Western Canada, we explore the potential for digital storytelling to enable learners to draw from their full communicative repertoires to enhance language and literacy learning and enable intersectional identity representation, renegotiation and affirmation. Our study is informed by three interrelated conceptual frameworks: intersectionality , communicative repertoires , and digital literacies . We undertook a six-phase process for thematic data analysis of the collection of digital stories, using contextual data such as semi-structured interviews, participant observations and informal conversations to understand the relationship between the students’ digital stories and their lived experiences. Using an adaptation of Rose’s (2016) visual methodology, we provide a more in-depth analysis of the digital stories of two students with a focus on the intersectionality of the various contexts of their lives and identities. Across all participants, four interweaving themes emerged from our thematic analysis of the nine digital stories overall: 1) contesting single-axis labels; 2) reconciling mutually constitutive categories of difference; 3) (re)claiming life stories; and 4) recognizing the critical role of audience. (293)
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